Health
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10 Simple Ways To Eat Less Without Noticing
Juicing: Stupid and Pretentious or Nourishing and Enlightening?
10 Tasty Carbs That Won’t Make You Fat
How To Start Working Out When You Don’t Like To Exercise
Focus More on Your Brain and Less on Your Diet if You’re Serious About Losing Weight
Home Court Habits: The Secret to Effortless Weight Control
10 Reasons You Aren’t Losing Weight When You Think You’re Doing Everything Right
How To Burn More Calories Without Breaking A Sweat
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Foodists
FOR THE LOVE OF FOOD: Vegan propaganda, exercise tones your brain, and the mysterious origins of Trader Joe’s foods
by Darya Rose | Aug 18, 2017
Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.
Next week’s Mindful Meal Challenge will start again on Monday. Sign up now to join us!
This week vegan propaganda, exercise tones your brain, and the mysterious origins of Trader Joe’s foods.
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Links of the week
- Debunking What the Health, the buzzy new documentary that wants you to be vegan – A few people were surprised to hear that I consider the new documentary What the Health to be propaganda. While I agree with many of the ideas in the film (people should eat more vegetables, the food industry can be evil, etc.), as someone very familiar with nutrition research it seems obvious to me that the film’s creators intentionally ignore data that contradicts their argument for the sake of ideology. This article does a decent job explaining how they do it. (Vox)
- We Need to Talk Some More About Your Dirty Sponges – If you freaked out a bit about last week’s article about bacteria infested kitchen sponges, you aren’t alone. The Times wants to quell your anxiety with some practical advice. (NY Times)
- Firmer, fitter frame linked to firmer, fitter brain – Interesting new data on what it means to have a healthier hippocampus. (ScienceDaily)
- Why Scientists Can’t Agree on Whether It’s Unhealthy to Be Overweight – This continues to be a heated debate, and it is helpful to know why. (The Atlantic)
- ‘Fat but fit’ are at increased risk of heart disease – To add fuel to the fire, here’s an even newer and bigger study warning about the dangers of excess weight. (ScienceDaily)
- Study: diet soda can really mess with your metabolism – Interesting new research on how your body and brain interpret sweetness and calories. (Vox)
- For Cosmetics, Let the Buyer Beware – It’s so frustrating that it remains so difficult to even know what is in the products that we use. Transparency is always valuable when it comes to chemicals we are exposed to. (NY Times)
- 6 foods that marketers want you to think are healthy – Don’t fall for it. (Washington Post)
- Where Do Trader Joe’s Snacks Even Come From? – Great question. (Lifehacker)
- Some Tuna Can Carry Up To 36 Times The Toxic Chemicals Of Others. Here’s Why – So depressing. (NPR)
- Gym-going seniors are benefiting from more than exercise – Don’t underestimate the power of your social network. (Washington Post)
- Watermelon & Halloumi Salad with Magic Sauce – How good does this look? (Green Kitchen Stories)
What inspired you this week?
I completely agree about the vegan “propaganda.” I see nothing wrong with being vegan, and I have quite a few vegan friends. I do, however, take issue with the claims in “What the Health” and other “documentaries” that take such a firm stance, and ignore data that supports other perspectives. I especially agree with Vox’s analysis of the “gotcha journalism” in “What the Health.” Those cold calls to the Cancer Society and other organizations were terrible. I felt so bad for the receptionists who had to take his calls. And I was appalled that they presented the situation as evidence that these organizations are involved in some conspiracy to hurt people.
I had a number of friends recommend this movie to me, and I was really disappointed when I watched it. I think it highlights that we should always be skeptical, even when we want to agree with something.
“we should always be skeptical, even when we want to agree with something.” great advice!
Did I miss the part of the scientific daily study that actually measured fitness by any other thing other than labs? THAT is the study that would be important, but is impossible to get right because its all self reporting of inaccurate data. What are those people eating and what is there activity? If it is harder to lose weight to original levels once significantly overweight because of metabolism changes, it would be good to study if the people who change their lifestyles but still aren’t as small as they were are the same. If overweight but eats well/active people who are still somewhat over weight but less than they were still have increased health problems, then what is the solution or the point of doing anything about it if being obese has the same risks as being overweight?
What The Health was a huge disappointment to me as well. I was particularly alarmed by their awful, irresponsible mishandling of the dangers of consuming sugar. Any diet that promotes the absolute removal of one prozed food group must allow the consumption, without worry, of another. In this case they took away meat and dairy in exchange for sugar. Just plain wrong and dangerous.
i see nothing wrong with being vegan. by being so you discover so many heathy things that start prooving your health and push it towards a good health. so its great
Amanda, have you ever googled “nutritional deficiencies in veganism” ? I’ve met many former vegans and their stories are eerily similar, they had bad diets as children, felt better on a high veg vegan diet, presumably because they were malnourished and the veggies cured that. Then after 8-10 years there was a decline in health wherein they discovered that they had new nutritional deficiencies low biotin, b12, vit a, iron in some cases, zinc, and gut problems from a high grain /high phytate diet. Basically those are nutrients that are leached out of the body over time and are replenished best via meat and dairy products. The best plan is to either plan on suplementing off and on or to occasionally eat some ethical /humane animal products. I agree…nothing wrong with veggies, but also nothin wrong with some meat all about the balance and, if you care, the sources of those products.
the whole weight vs. heart disease debate is pretty silly when you realize that it is so much more complicated and it seems to ignore the fact that “normal weight” people can have heart disease too!! What about those studies linking a diet low in vit. C to heart disease? The vit c helps to repair the arteries damaged by high blood pressure. Anyway, this is anecdotal but so what, my grandma is 98 has been 40-50 lbs overweight most of her adult life and has no diabetes, no heart disease that we know of, her cholesterol levels are fantastic with high HDL levels and low ldl. The only excercise she gets or has ever gotten is from yard work and an occasional walk around the block. She eats a high veg, low carb low fat diet and is the queen of moderation when it comes to extras like coffee, desert and greasy things. She also doesn’t eat pork, never liked it she says. She does eat other meats. Bottom line: her nutrition has been great her whole life, she’s got all her teeth. My mom (grandmas dtr), on the other hand has dieted and excerciesd hard most of her life, is a fish-itarian and is “normal weight” and has a slew of medical problems, arthritis, osteoparosis, bad teeth, chronic anemia. Mostly I think her nutrition is bad because of gut problems and not getting enough food to eat everyday esp. red meat!